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Only a Girl

“Only a girl”In Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls” she tells a story about a young girl’s resistance to womanhood in a society infested with gender roles and stereotypes. The story takes place in the 1940s on a fox farm outside of Jubilee, Ontario, Canada. During this time, women were viewed as second class citizens, but the narrator was not going to accept this position without a fight. Munro’s invention of an unnamed character symbolized the narrator’s lack of identity, compared to her younger brother, who was given the name Laird, which is a synonym for “Lord”. These names were given purposely by Munro to represent how at birth the male child was naturally considered superior to his sister. The father in the story was a fox farmer. He raised foxes and when their fur was prime, he skinned them and sold their pelts for profit. Growing up, “the girl” sought for attention from her father, therefore, she began to enjoy helping him work outside with the foxes. “My father did not talk to me unless it was about the job we were doing … Nevertheless I worked willingly under his eyes, and with a feeling of pride.” Consequently, she began to dread working in the kitchen with her mother, and thus loss respect for her mother’s subservient position in the household. When describing her mother’s housework it was “endless” compared to her father’s work outside, which was “ritualistically important.” This obvious resentment for society’s womanly duties symbolizes the narrator’s desire to be more than “just a girl”. The protagonist in the story began to realize society’s views of her when her father introduced her to a salesman, while she was working outside, as his “new hired hand”. She was almost pleased until the salesman replied “I thought it was only a girl”. Even her grandmother bombarded her with commands, “Girls keep their knees together when they sit down.” And “Girls don’t slam doors like that.” The worst was when she asked a question and her grandmother...

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ENWR 106-16
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25 Feb 2014
Girl
What makes a woman? Femininity and masculinity have long been defined and divided along gender lines that were never meant to be crossed; a man or woman who does not fit the archetypical picture of their strict gender-biased boundaries is shunned and stereotyped. A woman who does not embody the perception of the perfect wife and mother, especially in the 1950s-60s, would have been considered unladylike. In Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl”, the matters of womanhood and femininity are expressed as a mother teaches her daughter the rules and restrictions that come along with being a lady, especially those that will help her to be accepted in society.
Though this story came out in 1978, it is very likely that Kincaid intended it to harken back to the 1950s and 60s, when it was big for women to be very feminine, so the mother is teaching the daughter how to uphold this societal demand. The mother tells her daughter how to clean a house and mend clothing because that is what society expects her to be able to do. It is also important to note that while this story does not seem to take place in the United States, but rather in Kincaid’s childhood home of Antigua, the same subjective roles of womanhood were widely spread through the western world. During the 1970s, especially in America, women were more acceptably unrestricted in the sense that, for the first time, there were two clear categories: rebellious women,...

...January 2013
RR 54
Jamaica Kincaid’s short story “Girl” is of a complicated relationship with her mother that comes out in the mother-daughter dynamic in the story. The mother, obviously a dominant figure in the young girl’s upbringing, informs the young girl of various duties associated with being a young, dignified lady. Her mother gives the daughter advice to make her the "proper" woman she should in fact be, and this advice gets more and more firm as the story continues.
“Girl” is a very well suitable title for this story because the mother is instructing the child of the appropriate steps to take to become a woman, and had she already been a young woman then it wouldn’t be based off the mother acknowledging her of such things. The mother does most of the talking; she delivers a long series of warnings to the daughter, who twice responds but whose responses go unnoticed by the mother. For example, in the story the young girl asks if it was true that you sing benna in Sunday school. The mother, however, ignores her while continuing to tell her how to chew food in an appropriate way that won’t turn someone else’s stomach (157.) The simple fact that her mother opts to ignore her daughter lets the reader know that the daughter is very young because her mother felt that what she asked had no relation to the matter at hand and was a question a “child” would ask so therefore chose to disregard her; which further...

...Girl by Jamaica Kincaid
Jamaica Kincaid relates the relationship between a mother and daughter in her poem, “Girl”. The poem is about how a mother prepares her daughter to become a woman. She gives her a litany of valuable lessons to shape her behavior and character according to what is acceptable to their culture. Kincaid cleverly dropped hints throughout her poem suggesting that the culture being referred to is the Afro-Carribean culture. The Afro-Carribean culture is a blend of music, dance and cuisine mostly conducted in traditional lifestyle; and all these elements are represented in the poem. One of the most lucid hints is the fact that the mother teaches her daughter how to catch a fish, which describes their primary industry: fishing. Essentially, the mother is teaching her daughter a livelihood practiced in their community. The entire poem is both advice and reprimand to prepare a girl become a woman defined by her ability to perform all the household chores, behavior, and values.
The poem defines a woman by how she manages all the household chores that she is expected to carry out. This is evidenced by the first line of the poem. Kincaid starts with the mother’s teaching on how to do laundry, “Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap;wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry;” (Lines 1-2). This first two lines already emphasize the basic role of women as the...

...“Girl” by Hanif Kureishi
The short story written by Hanif Kureishi portrays a typical love story, but with complex aspects. Hanif Kureishi is an English author, novelist and short-story writer. “Girl” was written in 1999.
It revolves about a young woman, Nicole, who is in a relationship with an older man, Majid. A classic cliché, young girl falls in love with older experienced man, and with that some questions and problems naturally will arise.
They are together, despite of Majid’s age and his role as a husband and father, which he gave up to be with the much younger Nicole. She is in a place in her life, where she has just begun to discover herself and the many opportunities of life, while Majid is midway in his life and serene. He is ready for a serious relationship, while Nicole hesitates. She refers to him as her “older lover” (p.1 l.2) instead of using the term “boyfriend,” which she finds very banal. Nicole might as well feel insecure about her relationship and Majid’s feelings towards her. He left his wife and children to stay with a “girl”. In Nicole he sees a girl, and not a grown up woman. Majid has the desire to control some of her actions and he is completely aware of the strong influence he has on his young lover. This fits perfectly with the fact that she might have the need of a father figure, which she lacked in her childhood.
He is well educated and very informed on...

...is thought that numbers are coded in analogous, approximate fashion by an evolutionarily grounded pre-verbal magnitude representation [31-34].
The most important methodological challenge in magnitude discrimination experiments is that perceptual variables are inevitably correlated with number. These variables correlate both with each other and with numerosity and it is impossible to control for all of them at the same time. For instance, if intensive properties (individual item properties, like item size) are kept equal in a particular trial, extensive properties (properties of the set, like summed surface of all items in a group) will inevitably co-vary with number, and vice versa. With a simple example, a collection of 6 apples is not only more, but physically also larger than a collection of 3 apples. In nature, 'more' usually correlates with 'bigger' (number of individuals in a group, number of pieces of food, etc.). Infants can rely on these simple perceptual features of sets, instead of the more abstract property of numerosity. Several of the early studies did not control for these perceptual correlates of the stimuli [26,27] making infants' putative numerical performance indistinguishable from their perceptual performance. In fact, when overall surface [35] or circumference [36,37] is controlled during experiments, infants are more sensitive to the continuous perceptual variable than to number. It was also shown that infants habituated to total...

...There are several types of schools; public schools, private schools, international schools etc…. Each type of schools separates for two categories; mix schools, and boys-only and girls-only schools. Parents have doubts on, to which type of school their children should be admitted. In this paper, in which type of schools children learn better will be discussed.
Boys-only and girls-only schools are also called as single sex schools. In these schools boys and girls are taught in separate class rooms or schools, and this mostly exists in private schools. Some parents don't want their children to be in mixed-gender classrooms because, especially at certain ages, students of the opposite sex can be a distraction , also it will be helpful for children’s mentality to learn better. Therefore parents prefer to send their children for boys-only and girls-only schools.
Reasons for which children do not learn better in mixed schools are; biological differences between boys and girls, impact between boys and girls, sexual harassment in schools. These are the main reasons for children for not to learn better in mixed schools, and learn better in boys-only and girls-only schools.
REASONS FOR SINGLE SEX SCHOOLS’ STUDENTS LEARN BETTER.
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...HISTORY OF TAGAYTAY
The City of Tagaytay (Filipino: Lungsod ng Tagaytay) is a third class city in the province of Cavite, Philippines. Only 55 km (34 mi) away from Manila via Aguinaldo Highway, it is one of the country’s most popular tourist destinations. Tagaytay City provides a good view of the Taal Volcano. The city is a popular summer tourist destination because of its cool climate due to its high altitude.
Legend has it that the word “Tagaytay” came from “TAGA” meaning “to cut” and “ITAY” which means “Father”. A father and son were said to be on a wild boar hunt when the animal they were chasing turned and attacked them. As the boar charged towards the old man, the son cried “TAGA- ITAY”. The boy’s repeated shouts reverberated in the valleys of the ridge. Heard by the residents, hunters and wood gatherers, the cries became the subject of conversation for several days among the people in the countryside. In time, the place where the shouts came from became known as TAGAYTAY.
During the Philippine Revolution of 1896, the ridges and forests of Tagaytay became the sanctuary for revolutionaries including of those from nearby provinces. The passage to and from towns via Tagaytay added the word “Mananagaytay” to the native’s vocabulary. It means “to traverse ridges”.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, the 11th Airborne Division of Lieutenant General William Krueger’s 8th Army airdropped military supplies and personnel on the Tagaytay Ridge prior...

...﻿Victoria Hernandez
Rodney Rather
English 1302
Reader Response 1: “The OnlyGirl at the Boys’ Party”.
Sharon Old’s “One girl at the boys’ party” deals with the reality that we live in a society that’s constantly changing and conforming to social norms. The mother of the girl learns early on that the girl is singled out at the party because of her gender and therefore is put into a situation that lacks similarity. The environment consumes the girl and she becomes overwhelmed by the boys’ who “tower and bristle” (2, 3) over her “smooth and sleek” (3) being. It’s evident that the girl’s searching for identity among the boys and she uses math as reassurance. Through the confusion of the party and the outward chaos occurring in the environment she is able to find simplicity and consistency in mathematics. The girl uses the math to protect herself from what remains unknown in the solution of the problems. There is also unique sexual tone that is carried out throughout the poem first in the setting in which the poem takes place. The pool party, where the focus is on that of the contours of a body and the “curves of their sexes”. (19) The sexuality adds another level to the poem which further deepens the conflict between the sole girl at the party and the multitude of boys.
“As the drops sparkle and fall to the power of a thousand from her body.” (21, 22) Her...